Tag: cisgender

Cis people, we apparently need a guide for how to introduce our trans friends/relatives/acquaintances. I’m going to do my best here to put some guidelines together. I welcome suggestions, too.

The first thing to know: this guide comes in two parts. One part deals with people who knew/knew of the person before transition began and is either meeting them again or meeting them for the first time. The other part deals with people who meet the trans person after transition has begun/after they have come out as transgender to you.

Part I:How to introduce your trans friend to people who knew them/knew of them pre-transition

Do not wait until everyone is standing in the ‘introduction circle’ to bring up the topic of transition.

Do check with your trans friend for comfort level pre-introductions: does your friend want to be introduced as a brand-new person (and is this possible)? How would your friend like to be introduced? What kinds of things is your friend comfortable with other people knowing about them/her/him?

When appropriate (after ascertaining your friend’s comfort level), do tell your relatives, non-trans friends (the people to whom you’re introducing your trans friend) ahead of time that your friend is transgender. Say something like, “Aaron is transgender and uses the name Abigail now,” or “The person you have known as Eva has transitioned and has changed his name to Jim.”

Do make sure your trans friend knows if you are not comfortable doing this sort of introduction. It is much better to know what kind of situation we’re walking into than to go in unaware and be met with potentially unsafe/unkind reactions.

This is the crux of the matter. Those who know someone as one gender and are either re-meeting them as another gender or are meeting them for the first time as a gender other than the one they expected may have unexpected and unsafe, volatile reactions to the trans person in the moment. This is not the fault of the trans person. It is the fault of many things, including poor education (biology, sexual health, religion), poor indoctrination, and systematic issues such as transphobia and misogyny. Not everyone will react volatilely, but the risk is high enough that if there is the option to curb that risk for our trans friends, then we should. This is one way we can put our cisgender privilege in service of our transgender siblings.

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Cis people, we have work to do. I’m calling you in with me to do this work of dismantling the systems that hold us all down, and I want us to do this by starting with educating one another.

Today, let’s talk about gender, sex, and genitals–what they are and what they aren’t. I know a lot of us are confused, because we’ve been taught by our binary-loving system that gender and sex and genitals are all the same things. We’ve been taught that genitals come in exactly two forms–either penis or vagina–and that sex and gender necessarily follow that format, as well.

We’re wrong. We’ve been taught wrong.

Don’t panic.

We can fix this.

Let’s start with genitals. This probably seems both the most and least confusing all at once–because of course it’s always penis or vagina, right? Except no. Intersex people exist. And some intersex people have genitals that aren’t clearly ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’. (This is not the case for all intersex people.) And even when a person’s outer genitals look a certain way, their inner anatomy may not match. Or their chromosomes may not match. Their hormones may not match. So–even our genitalia doesn’t fall on a strict binary.

Okay, so what about sex, then? Isn’t sex a biological thing? Yes, and no. Mostly, we assign sex based on genitals. We ‘sex’ people and animals based on what we observe their outward genitals to be. So this can only be as biological as our constructed categories. That is: we’ve made some categories to describe what we’ve observed. And what we’ve observed is that biology–genitalia–doesn’t follow a strict binary. It follows a continuum. So sex can’t be a strict binary, either. If we are going to insist that sex be assigned based upon genitalia, then we must allow that sex exist as a continuum, as well–and recognize that it is a category we’ve made up to describe something we’ve observed.

Moving on to gender, then. Gender has two parts: identity and expression.

Gender identity is a person’s inward self-definition. You can try this yourself, at home, on the bus, or wherever you’re reading: I am ________. A woman? A trans man? Non-binary? Agender? Genderfluid? All of these, and many others, are valid answers here. This is completely detached from anything else about a person–what genitals a person possesses, what sex/gender a person was assigned at birth, etc.

Gender expression is a person’s outer presentation of self. This could include clothing, hair style, make-up or lack thereof, shaving or not, handbags or briefcases or none at all, bow ties or hair ties, or just about any other thing one might use to outwardly indicate a sense of self. Gender expression may or may not hinge upon one’s self-defined gender identity, one’s sex, and/or one’s genitalia. For example, I am a cisgender (identifying as the gender I was assigned at birth) cissex (identifying as the sex I was assigned at birth) woman who often presents in a feminine manner, but who often presented quite masculinely in my undergrad days. I’ve always self-identified female regardless of how I’ve expressed.

Figuring out that these things are all actually separate things is huge. Realizing how much of our lives exist on continuums as opposed to in strict binaries is amazing.

If we start here, educating one another with this information, we can begin to set ourselves and our transgender siblings free.

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CW: I’m discussing the continuing harassment of Lila Perry, a transgender girl in Missouri–my current home state. She has been using the girls’ locker room and bathrooms since school started this year, and many students (many of them female) have walked out in protest. In this post, I am addressing TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist) comments regarding this issue. I’m putting the rest of this post below a cut so that trans people do not need to read this and be triggered. Cis people, I am a cis person talking to you. Please do read this post.

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I’m going to be talking about some things I encountered on social media this week from two family members–one on each side of my family, both of whom I looked up to greatly as a child, one of whom supposedly supports my wife and I a great deal. Both of these things involve transgender people. I’ll be posting the images of what was posted, in order to deconstruct these things.

This is me, a cisgender person, talking to other cisgender people, about the things we’re doing to hurt transgender people. We need to stop.

I’m putting the rest below a cut, so that those who already have to deal with these aggressions on a daily basis (trans folks) do not need to be subjected to it one more time just so I can get my point out to other cisgender folks.

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My wife and I had a conversation the other day revolving around her transition. She mentioned that she’d written a journal wherein she realizes she’ll be coming out forever–a feeling which I as a bi/pan person can understand, since I’m also always coming out. In our discussion, and in her journal, she brushed on the pressures of ‘fitting in,’ of ‘passing‘ as cisgender.

I paused the conversation there, because I wanted to check in with her. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t trying to conform to something that wasn’t her, that she wasn’t trying to fit into a mold with an ever-changing, ever-moving target of cisgender ‘femininity’ just because it has ‘cisgender’ attached to it. I wanted to make sure she felt free to be herself.

And I wanted to mention an article I’d read: The Null HypotheCis. This article points out that our society tends to treat ‘cisgender/cissexual’ as the null, the standard, the thing against which we test.

After all, surely if we’re going to risk so much, put so much at stake, in such a monumental “decision”, we should approach it carefully, and make sure to be certain, right? Shouldn’t we be looking for proof that we’re trans before gambling our whole lives on that being the case?

Well, maybe… if proof of being trans was even really something possible, beyond the simple proof of subjectively experiencing your identity and gender as such. But more importantly: we never ask ourselves for “proof” that we’re cis.

And yet–identifying as cisgender is (as the article points out) every bit as much of a subjective thing as is identifying as transgender. (And perhaps that’s part of the discomfort of transgender identities–that such persons make us call our cis selves into question, make us think about how subjective our identities really are.) I brought it up to her because I know how easy it is to buy into that narrative of the societally structured null hypothesis, that ‘straight’ is null and LGB is the question.

As a bisexual woman married to someone who didn’t come out of the closet as MtF until well after we were married, I lived with ‘heterosexual couple privilege’ for years. And I still do, in some ways, since we’re still in the very beginning stages of Eren coming out at work and making legal marker changes.

And yet–both Eren and I live with stigma every day. Both of us are eternally coming out. And sometimes, it’s exhausting and hard and emotionally draining. Sometimes people expect us to be the educational battering rams to knock down their uneducated peers’ views.

Eren and I worry more about her external safety and my internal safety. We worry about someone ‘finding out’ she’s transgender and deciding to hurt or kill her for that. A world that makes a punchline out of her existence means her existence is in itself dangerous and a challenge to the system. We worry about my internal safety as I am currently the one teetering most precariously on that depression slope. We worry that in 49 states (including ours), ‘trans panic’ is still a ‘defense’ for killing a transgender person.

Transmisogyny not only names the oppression trans women face as both trans people and as women, but it is also an enormously valuable concept for understanding what motivates violence in a patriarchal culture. It is both a specific descriptor and a larger framework for understanding much more about how gender works in our society. In fact, I would argue that the simultaneous hatred of both transness and femininity — transmisogyny — is at the root of much, perhaps even most, of the anti-queer violence in our world.

Let me be very clear: I in no way wish to take away from the specificity of the term transmisogyny and the experience of the world, unique to trans women and nonbinary transfeminine people, that it describes. I am emphatically not arguing that people who are not trans women or otherwise transfeminine directly experience transmisogyny. Rather, I believe that transmisogyny is such a strong (and often subconscious) influencer of attackers’ thoughts and actions that it underlies many of the ways in which people of all genders are disciplined and punished over perceived gender and sexual transgressions.

In other words, while transmisogyny is primarily aimed at trans women and transfeminine people, and it is experienced solely by them in ways that should be discussed without mention of other groups, its prevalence in the world is so widespread that it also happens to “spill over” into violence against others.

Combining this with The Null HypotheCis idea, we can see why so many people are threatened by transgressions against boundaries thought to be objective but actually subjective. And we can see that these shouldn’t actually be seen as threats but as freedoms for all of us, ways to break the bonds that those ‘objective’ boundaries have held us in. If we can break free from a reliance on supposedly objective understandings of gender and turn our gazes to subjective understandings, perhaps we can break free of the violence against queer people of all stripes–particularly transgender women of color–and perhaps we can begin to see visibility and a reduction in suicide rates amongst bi and trans groups.

A lot has been made about the Bible’s negative views of sex and marriage and relationships–but it has also modeled some positive views. The entire book of Song of Songs, for example, can be read straight as the love poem it is–about two lovers meeting, trysting, having sex with one another, all without being married. Interestingly, this was the most-translated book by monks in the Middle Ages–mostly to say that it was a metaphor of God’s love, of course–but it does leave one to wonder what else the monks may have been thinking. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

A lot of people who put forth that two people must wait until marriage to have sex will try to claim that such views come from an Adam-and-Eve model of sexuality (which is very cissexist and heteronormative of them, to say the least). And while starting with creation sounds like a great foundation for laying claim to something–because what better way to stake a claim to power?–it doesn’t really hold up on examination.

So, not only do Adam and Eve not get married before they have sex and have children, but also–at least one creation story doesn’t seem to require human beings to be heteronormatively paired (and thus biologically capable of reproducing together) in order to have children, thereby destroying another common argument: that sex is for procreation, and that’s why two people should wait until marriage (because all children ‘obviously’ need two [heterosexual] parents–neveryoumind cases of abuse, incest, and the like, or people who consciously choose to be single parents, or people who choose to partner but cannot procreate or do not want to procreate…..).

Ahem. Anyway.

So, no, the argument that sex-waits comes from Adam and Eve doesn’t hold up, because hey: Adam and Eve didn’t get married. And–even if they had–their marriage likely wouldn’t have looked like what we consider marriage to look like today.

So where does it come from? I argue that it comes from the pseudo-Pauline epistles. What are those? These are the letters after the seven likely letters of Paul. Most people I know raised in the Christian Church think of Paul as an anti-LGBTQI, anti-woman, anti-sex, prudish, non-inclusive, exclusive ass. I used to agree.

But.

It turns out that Paul has only 7 likely epistles, with 6 more attributed to him by admirers and one undoubtedly not by him at all. The 7 likely letters by Paul show Paul to be a pretty inclusive person–he wanted everyone to be on equal standing with one another, with no one above or below. All were to be a part of the body of Christ, with no ‘body part’ functioning in a superior manner to any other body part–because all were needed. And Paul utilized women in his ministry in very important roles, which may have angered those who came after him. 1 Timothy in particular, as well as the other Pastoral epistles, turns these verses of inclusion on their heads. Where Paul preaches for women to be cared for, the Pastoral epistles preach that the church should not provide for women unless they reach a certain age and are widows–thereby ruining many women’s chances to enter the ministry in an effective way. And where Paul taught that all were a part of the body, with no body part superior, the pseudo-Pauline epistles taught that man was the head of the woman, ruling over her, in the ‘body of Christ.’ Superiority was put in place.

The church had been providing for women’s livelihoods under Paul’s instructions, allowing some women to remain unmarried and therefore able to be ministers. But in marriages, they had duties to perform, customs to follow, and usually could not stray from those duties in order to be ministers like the men of their communities could. Thus, with women suborned through a twisting of Paul’s teachings, men could retain power.

I think this is where our ‘modern’ ideas about heteronormative, cisgender sex-waits marriage ideals comes from. And I think this is the sin. I think it twists because it unnaturally binds, shaming people who do not deserve to be shamed.

I don’t think this is what God intended. I don’t think God ever intends for us to shame one another about how and who we love, and how and with whom we have sex–so long as we’re doing so honestly and openly, with integrity. Even casual sex–that much maligned predator of all our young people!–can be healing. Just as importantly, choosing not to have sex–if we don’t want to (maybe we’re demisexual, for example)–is awesome, too. The point is that all of us get to choose, and it doesn’t have to be dependent on some arbitrary line drawn in the sand by society or by a legal body. So long as we are able to consent, then we are able to make our own choices about our sexualities and our bodies–and I think that’s how God intended it when God made such a diverse array of human beings.

So, no, I don’t think premarital sex is a sin. I think sex that is forced–rape, coercion (without it being consensual non-consent)–is sin. I think that forcing people into unnatural unions just to get their needs met is sin. I think oppressing people for power is sin. And I think we’ve been doing all of these things for centuries, while gaslighting one another and ourselves into believing the opposite–which is why there’s so much cognitive dissonance surrounding sex in our culture.